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Don't blame unions for cities' woes

Two very high-profile and lengthy municipal strikes ended recently.

CUPE Ontario president Sid Ryan, left, and CUPE national president Paul Moist share a stage at an anti-poverty rally in Toronto on this Oct. 17, 2007 photo. (COLIN PERKEL / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO)

By Paul MoistCUPE National President

Wed., Aug. 5, 2009

Two very high-profile and lengthy municipal strikes ended recently.

We could analyze the events in Windsor and Toronto endlessly but that would not serve much purpose. A better approach is to focus on why these two employers chose to use the recession as cover to demand unfair concessions from workers, and why city workers were vilified for upholding their right to strike.

I believe the employers did what they did because they thought they could get away with it. They thought workers wouldn't strike during a recession – not while many others are losing their jobs.

Some critics have bitterly criticized CUPE members for having the audacity to strike in the midst of a recession. But civic workers' wages did not cause the economic ills that both cities face. Toronto has been in a recession since the former Harris government forced amalgamation and downloaded social services and housing to the municipal property tax base. In Windsor, the community has been in recession since the end of the Auto Pact and the collapse of the Big Three automakers.

Taking away the hard-fought wages and benefits of city workers does nothing to address the larger issue of years of financial mismanagement. Moreover, it seems that only a select group of workers was expected to make sacrifices. In Windsor, city councillors retained retiree benefits that future CUPE hires are now ineligible for. In Toronto, the city sought a wage freeze from CUPE workers without requesting the same from other city unions. Meanwhile, councillors gave themselves a 2.4 per cent wage hike.

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CUPE members in Toronto went eight years in the 1990s without a wage increase. Any benefits they have now, they paid for in the past. These workers understood the severity of the recession. But the 100-plus pages of concessions demanded by the city were something they could not accept. The city's demands were taken off the table over the course of the strike, but it took a strike to make it happen.

Large municipal strikes are hard for all sides – union members, the city and the public. They create a media frenzy so cacophonous that sometimes more subtle, enduring issues are drowned out. This summer, Windsor and Toronto became ground zero for the future of labour rights in this country. What emerged is the fact that unions will have to stand stronger than ever to prevent concession bargaining from becoming the norm.

CUPE members in Windsor and Toronto, like all other wage-earners in Canada (both union and non-union) experienced very little real wage growth during the past 25 years. Average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, increased by only about 50 cents during the past quarter century, according to Statistics Canada. This doesn't justify a blank cheque for unions in bargaining, but nor should it provide space for the employer to demand concessions such as Windsor and Toronto sought.

During that period, real GDP per person in Canada rose by over 100 per cent, but real wages remained stagnant and the gap between the haves and have-nots has widened. The danger for workers is the mindset that if unionized workers lost their benefits and earned less, things would be fairer. What is fair is for more Canadians to be paid what they're worth, receive sufficient benefits and earn a decent pension.

The labour force issues of our time are not the benefits paid to workers. They are growing retirement and pension insecurity and the reduced labour markets the baby boom generation will leave behind in retirement. In addition, our federal government must decide on an industrial strategy for this century. The forestry sector is in crisis, the auto sector is a shell of its former self, and there isn't a Canadian-owned steel company left in the country.

These are the labour issues that deserve space, dialogue and legitimate debate. If they received even half the attention that CUPE collective agreements have in Toronto and Windsor, our economy, which has been turned upside down, might be able to turn right side up again.

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